INTELLECTUAL INVENTIVENESS is measured by the ability to forget, not the ability to remember. The history of creativity has been built on inaccuracy, wrongfulness, and distortion; the more misled the apprentice is, the more incorrectly he understands his master’s art, the greater chance he has to make a contribution. In the same way, fruition relies on deviance; it is the mutated DNA codes that manifest their distinct features in the living cell.

The permanent stress of living entails these inaccuracies and mistakes, without which innovation could not happen. As with the laws of thermo­dynamics and bioenergetics, it is within this system of constant pressure that we obtain the potential for work, or what Josiah Willard Gibbs defined as free energy.

My painting-from-photography series “Destroyed Aristocracy,” 1970–86 (which was banned in Soviet times and which I